Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a homemade, spicy salsa of a memoir.  Biting into it sometimes makes the reader wince but nothing short of a snarky spouse hiding it could possibly keep anyone from devouring this riveting and eerily unnerving tome. I’m tempted to tell you that you really need nothing more than an explication of the title to convince you that you should stop everything to read this book.  Jeanette Winterson was adopted by a religious zealot, a woman so unhappy that she stayed up nights baking cakes to avoid the marital bed and so sure of her convictions that she told her daughter very early in her childhood that “The devil led us to the wrong crib.”  Mrs. Winterson tried beatings, locked her daughter in a coal hole and conducted a sadistic three-day exorcism when she learned that Jeanette was attracted to those of her own sex.  When Jeanette expressed a desire to be happy, her mother asked the question any psychotic parent would ask, “Why be happy when you could be normal?”  When your mother keeps the bullets for her revolver in a can of Pledge, you can be sure that nothing she does will surprise you which may explain how Jeanette Winterson shows humor and a healthy degree of objectivity in describing the woman.  That anyone growing up in such a household could write caringly enough to engender sympathy for Mrs. Winterson is truly a testament to Jeanette Winterson’s skill.

Reading saved the author and eventually won her a spot at Oxford and a career as a novelist perhaps best known in Britain for her 1985 autobiographical novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and its highly successful television adaptation.  But Winterson couldn’t find the elusive happiness she sought at age sixteen when her mother kicked her out and she thought she’d left the abuse behind.  She stumbles through relationships, battles depression and begins a search for her biological mother.  The second half of the book is an emotionally difficult read because Winterson is so honest in her telling of her own failures.  She succeeds because of who she is:  For most of my life I’ve been a bare-knuckle fighter. The one who wins is the one who hits the hardest. I was beaten as a child and I learned early never to cry. If I was locked out overnight I sat on the doorstep till the milkman came, drank both pints, left the empty bottles to enrage my mother, and walked to school.

Summing it Up:  Read this memoir for Winterson’s laser sharp language and honest portrayal of her life. Savor her ability to show her path to peace.  Published in 2011 in Britain, Why Be Happy was chosen as Best Book of 2011 by The Guardian, Book of the Year for Memoir by The Telegraph and Book of the Week by the BBC. 

Rating: 5 stars    Category: Nonfiction, Gourmet, Book Club

Publication date: March 6, 2012 (U.S.)

Author Web Site: http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/

Read an Excerpt: http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/assets/pdf/Why%20Be%20Happy%20intro.pdf

What Others are Saying:  

The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/04/why-be-happy-jeanette-winterson-review

Kirkus Reviews: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/jeanette-winterson/why-be-happy-when-you-could-be-normal/#review

New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/jeanette-wintersons-new-memoir.html?ref=books

Publishers Weekly: http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-8021-2010-6

Three Weeks in December by Audrey Schulman

Three Weeks in December is one of those rare novels that excites, educates, and elucidates without preaching or belaboring.  It wasn’t until I put the novel down that I realized how much I’d learned about Africa, gorillas, Asperger’s, lions, colonialism, and unforeseen consequences.  Told in alternating chapters that evoke the language and pace of The Poisonwood Bible, this inventive glimpse into the “dark” continent opens in December, 1899, when Jeremy, a quiet, unprepared gentleman with a secret, travels from Maine to British East Africa with his beloved horse to supervise hundreds of Indian laborers brought in to build a railroad.  When lions begin attacking their camp and killing his men, Jeremy turns to his indispensable aide, Otombe, for assistance.  Otombe, the athletic, strong opposite of Jeremy, learned his perfect English when a British missionary couple raised him until he was six when they gave birth to their own child and returned him to his tribe.

Based on a real incident in the 1890s when two lions ate over 100 Africans, Indian railroad workers, and British administrators near the River Tsavo in what is now Kenya, the historically based sections are both informative and surreal in their intensity. Schulman’s taut, precise language makes the jungle, the animals and the people in it come alive with sentences like this: “Not a hippo chuffed, not a leopard rasped. . . At the moment, the silence was so crisp he could hear it ringing in his head.  Then the screaming started, the gunshots and the clanking of pans.  Camp.  At this distance, all the fear and frenzy was stripped from the noise, just faint clanks and pops and squeals, the pathos of bugs.  Above the other noises, one man’s voice cut through, a single word called again and again, crying out the name of his lost friend.”

In the alternating chapters set in December, 2000, we meet Max, an American ethnobotanist, who travels to Rwanda in search of a mysterious vine that could be a cure for heart disease. The coping skills Max utilizes to manage her Asperger’s give her a unique vista into the non-verbal communication of the gorillas in the remote mountain station where a violent group of young boys threatens the existence of the endangered animals.   If this book is made into a movie (and it has to be), whoever plays Max is almost guaranteed an Oscar as she’s one of the most peculiar and yet most endearing characters I’ve ever encountered.  Max’s skill at sitting quietly and observing everything around her allows readers to experience the land, smells, and sounds as if we were seeing it through her perspicacious eyes.   Audrey Schulman’s skill in making a character who eschews personal contact seem so compelling is masterful.  

As both Max and Jeremy are atypical outsiders dropped into an alien culture, their struggles provide drama and tension while exposing the underside of both development and preservation. The ending reinforces this tension and provides a great sighing “ah, ha” for the reader.  This novel is a paperback original from Europa Editions, the ones with the double fold covers that make reading such a pleasure. Europa provides novels that readers might not otherwise discover as it did with The Elegance of the Hedgehog.  Because it’s a paperback original I predict that it’ll be a book club hit immediately.  I plan to beg my book groups to choose it.  Watch the book trailer and I think you’ll agree. If you do choose it,  Ms. Schulman will skype with or call your book group and answer your questions. Check her website to arrange a "visit."

Summing it Up:  Read this for the two compelling stories of Africa set one-hundred years apart.  Savor it for the unique characters, the surprising ending, and for what you’ll learn.  Buy a friend a copy as you’ll want to discuss it the minute you finish.

Rating: 5 stars    Category: Fiction, Gourmet, Historical Fiction, Super Nutrition, Book Club

Publication date: January 31, 2012 (paperback original from Europa Editions)

Author Web Site including an exceptional video book trailer: http://threeweeksindecember.com/

Read an Excerpt: http://threeweeksindecember.com/images/excerpt3.pdf

What Others are Saying:  

Kirkus Reviews: http://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/audrey-schulman/three-weeks-december/

New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/books/review/three-weeks-in-december-by-audrey-schulman.html

Publishers Weekly: http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-60945-064-9

Festival of Faith and Writing

Tomorrow is the early registration deadline for one of my favorite events, The Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, held this year on April 19 - 21.  I've attended this  biennial festival five times and have heard Mary Karr, Salman Rushdie, Ernest Gaines, Michael Chabon, Elizabeth Strout, Yann Martel, and many other amazing writers speak.  In addition to large lectures, the festival (and it really is more of a festival than a conference) features panel discussions, small groups, and much much more.  This year the keynote speakers will be Gary Schmidt, Jonathan Safran Foer, Marilynne Robinson and Chimanada Ngozi Adichie.  I'm also eagerly awaiting hearing Kate Braestrup, Mark Richard, Debra Dean, Luis Alberto Urrea, and several others.  


Give yourself a Valentine and register today: http://festival.calvin.edu/festival-2012


The early registration rate is $175 (until February 15, 2012), after that the rate is $195.  This includes three full days and nights of concurrent events that will have your head spinning as you attempt to choose which ones to attend.  They're almost all exceptional as is the spirit of the event.

House of Prayer No. 2 by Mark Richard

House of Prayer No. 2 is as gothic and Southern as a memoir can get. I predict it'll sweep through book clubs like tornadoes twist through the south when it comes out in paper next month. Unlike the usual first person voice of most memoirs – Mark Richard tells his tale primarily in the second person imperative thus delivering his life in a series of jabs that punctuate the landscape like cherry bombs that kids might have tossed on dead-end gravel roads in the towns he called home. Richard’s voice makes this memoir gritty and real while underneath it’s tender and spiritual.  Comparisons to Rick Bragg’s All Over But the Shoutin’ are inevitable but Mark Richard’s tale is peerless in its originality. His opening chapters read like a Biblical creation story because he’s showing his readers how the place where he began delivered him to where he is today. 

When a book opens with: “Say you have a “special child.’ Which in the South means one between Down’s and dyslexic,” you know you’re encountering a unique voice.  Then add sentences like: “Give the child a sandbox to play in, in which scorpions build nests.  Let the mother cut the grass and run over rattlesnakes, shredding them all over the yard. Make the mother cry and miss her mother. Isolate her from the neighbors because she is poor and Catholic.”  You will not only know Mark Richard, you will feel him deep in your bones. More from that first chapter:

Move the family to a tobacco county in Southside Virginia. It is the early sixties, and black families still get around on mule and wagon. Corn grows up to the backs of houses even in town. Crosses burn in yards of black families and Catholics. Crew cut the special child’s hair in the barbershop where all the talk is of niggers and nigger-lovers. Give the child the responsibility of another playmate, the neighbor two houses down, Dr. Jim. When Dr. Jim was the child’s age, Lee left his army at Appomattox. When Dr. Jim falls down between the corn rows he is always hoeing, the child must run for help. Sometimes the child just squats beside Dr. Jim sprawled in the corn and listens to Dr. Jim talking to the sun. Sometimes in the orange and grey dust when the world is empty, the child lies in the cold backyard grass and watches the thousand starlings swarm Dr. Jim’s chimneys, and the child feels like he is dying in an empty world.

Southern euphemisms sometimes label a child and keep him in his place but calling Mark Richard a “special child” doesn’t stop him.  Clearly everyone in town considers him “special” both because of his deformed hips and because his oddness makes them think he's mentally challenged.  Then Richard endures long periods of confinement at the Crippled Children’s Hospital in Richmond, VA, a place that he renders Dickensian. Yet as difficult as the hospital is, it might be better than home where his alcoholic father provides little support.

Richard’s early adult years find him dwelling in shacks, borrowed apartments and on a shrimp boat while hiding from himself.  His occupations vary from house painter to private investigator until a short story a teacher submits on his behalf is published in the Atlantic and he begins his writing career and falls in love.

Just as Richard’s life seems to settle down with an offer to teach, he feels the call to ministry.  This later leads him back to an unlikely spot for a man who now seems to have it all: The House of Prayer No. 2 Church where he and his mother are usually the only white worshipers.  There he finds a place where his call turns into action.  Along the way, Richard’s intimate view of his life is packed with staccato word pictures that will make any reader thankful that Mark Richard survived to tell his tale.

Summing it Up: Read this memoir to experience nothing like you’ve ever read before.  Grab a blanket and a comfortable chair; you may not put this one down until you’ve devoured it in one fell swoop.

Rating: 5 stars    Category: Nonfiction, Gourmet, Grits, Soul Food, Book Club

Publication date: February 15, 2011 (Paperback: February 14, 2012)

Read an Excerpt: http://www.randomhouse.com/book/153828/house-of-prayer-no-2-by-mark-richard#excerpt

What Others are Saying:

Christian Science Monitor: http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2011/0221/House-of-Prayer-No.-2

New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/books/review/Bynum-t.html

The New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/bookclub/2011/05/june-book-club-house-of-prayer-no-2-1.html#ixzz1jdRc7OWp

Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704758904576188480264073952.html

Sarah Andrew Ohaver

Today would have been my mother's 90th birthday. Sarah Andrew Ohaver showed me how to love reading and writing proving that such a love is caught not taught. She married on November 30, 1946. She was 4' 11 1/2" tall and weighed 87 pounds on her wedding day. She loved her family and friends with utter abandon. She's the reason I began writing my book lists. They started as lists of books for her to read during chemotherapy. After her friends asked for copies, I began making them public.  Mom would be very happy to see others enjoying them.   She loved mysteries and "good" fiction.

A Pocketful of Light by Jan Stafford Kellis

A Pocketful of Light, 13 Days in the World’s First Tourist Destination, is a charming look at Jan Kellis’s Italian trip with her teenage daughter, Stephanie.  I recommend it for anyone contemplating a European voyage with a teen or young adult offspring.  Kellis’s attention to detail in her planning will help travelers anticipate and prepare for minor irritations.  While it won’t replace a traditional guidebook, it might just make reluctant parents realize that such a trek is possible even without a substantial budget. 

Starting in Venice, Kellis captures the reader with her honest reactions: “Immediately overwhelming.  Chaotic, confusing, and, well, foreign. My first impressions of Venezia were compromised by one of my best assets, my self-confidence. . .”  Here Kellis shows how so many of us, especially Americans, feel when we’re first in a new place then she guides us in ways to overcome our fears.  Arranging to meet an old friend and her teenage daughter in Tuscany (the friend was a Norwegian foreign exchange student who lived with the Kellis family in the 1980s) adds to the excitement of the trip and will make readers think about ways to enliven a trip with a younger traveler.

When the duo meet Kate and Liam, a mother and son from Colorado, in Tuscany, they learn that they’ll both be in Sorrento at the same time setting up one of the joys of traveling – the chance encounters that can make a trip exceptional. Kellis also tells of the minor difficulties that can derail a trip, things like long bus rides, tired feet and ogling men but she tempers them with an openness that allows for humor and joy in the journey. Picking up sea glass on a Mediterranean beach and carrying it in her pockets led Kellis to note: “the sea glass emitted a comforting glow. I’m carrying a pocketful of light. . .” 

Still carrying the reflected light, they cancel their last night in Sorrento so they can spend more time in Rome with their new friends thus illustrating that careful planning needn’t become a stranglehold. This portion of the book carries the reader along with the foursome as they enjoy the Spanish steps and delectable meals in each other’s company.

The book ends one year later when the Kellis family visits Kate and Liam in Denver and begins planning their next trip. It also includes useful appendices with lists and the trip budget. 

Summing it Up: Read this book to decide if you might like to travel with your child and to enjoy tagging along with a typical American family as they share their journey. 

Rating: 4 stars    Category: Nonfiction, Dessert, Super Nutrition

Publication date: July 18, 2011

                   

Jan Stafford Kellis is also the author of Bookworms Anonymous, a book about a non-traditional book club in the upper peninsula of Michigan.  Find information about her club and the books they’re reading at: http://www.bookwormsanonymous.com.

Author's website: http://www.jankellis.com

Read an excerpt: http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/jankellis

The World We Found by Thrity Umrigar

The World We Found is the new novel from Thrity Umrigar, a talented writer, whose The Space Between Us is one of the best, literary novels of the past decade. Yet Umrigar also writes page-turning, popular fiction - novels that shed light on the changing culture of her native India through characters that could be our neighbors in Ann Arbor or the Cleveland suburbs. 

The World We Found draws the reader in immediately with Laleh, a privileged wife and mother, breaking a tooth and finding it “an outward manifestation of the brokenness she’d felt ever since the phone call from Armaiti. An uncharacteristic acceptance descended upon Laleh, in contrast to the denial she had felt since Armaiti called with news about her cancer.” Armaiti, who has lived in the U.S. for years, has only six months to live so she wants to see her three best friends again.  They were inseparable activists in college in the late 1970s.  Lelah and Kavita, a successful architect, are still in contact but no one has heard from Nishta since she married their collegiate colleague, Iqbal, and disappeared from their lives.  Lelah and Kavita track Nishta to a sheltered and impoverished Muslim enclave where she wears a burkha and is guarded by Iqbal’s fundamentalist family. 

The world each of these women has found in the thirty years since their idealistic college days has changed drastically. Umrigar uses their different lives to reflect on the changes in India and the U.S. and to show that the world each of us finds is the one we must navigate.  This novel soars above others in the genre when it shows how the Hindu-Muslim conflicts of the early 1990s changed the way people like Iqbal saw the world around them.  It also foreshadows an airport scene where all it takes to solve a dilemma is today’s equivalent of yelling “Fire” in a crowded theatre and watching stereotypes come into play.  That scene alone makes the book worth reading and clearly illustrates Umrigar’s title and premise that the world we find is the one we adapt to and use – sometimes without considering the consequences.

The World We Found will appeal to Elizabeth Berg and Anita Shreve fans in that it takes something that could happen to anyone and turns it on its side by showing it to the reader through multidimensional characters.   It also provides secondary plots involving each of the main characters that add to making this novel different from the usual.  Its careful turns of phrase and setting allow the reader to vicariously meet the women of Mumbai.  Just as readers love historical fiction because it allows them to learn about history without having to read academic tomes, this novel will appeal to readers who want to know about modern-day Mumbai through getting to know its citizens.

Summing it Up:  Read this to enjoy a page-turner that will transport you to Mumbai and its changing culture while enveloping you in the lives of women who could be your friends and neighbors if you got to know them.

Rating: 4 stars    Category: Fiction, Grandma's Pot Roast, Super Nutrition, Book Club

Publication date: January 3, 2012

Author’s Website: http://www.umrigar.com/

Read an Excerpt: http://www.harpercollins.com/browseinside/index.aspx?isbn13=9780061938344

Reading Group Questions: http://www.harpercollins.com/author/authorExtra.aspx?authorID=29280&isbn13=9780061938344&displayType=readingGuide

What Others are Saying: 

Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nina-sankovitch/discovering-the-world-we-_b_1181544.html

Kirkus Reviews:  http://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/thrity-umrigar/world-we-found/

Publishers Weekly: http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-06-193834-4